February 2013

February 28, 2013

The first privately funded mission to Mars has been announced with a launch date set for January 5, 2018.

‘Inspiration Mars’, initially bankrolled by millionaire space enthusiast Dennis Tito, proposes to take a man and a woman, preferably husband and wife, on a 501-day return journey to our red planetary neighbor. The significance of timing the mission five years from now lies in the fact that at that point Mars and Earth will be in their closest alignment, separated by just 57.6 million kilometers or 35.8 million miles as compared to the average of over 225 million kilometers or 139 million miles. At their opposite most they are 401 million kilometers or 249 million miles apart.

This is a no-frills flyby mission where the spacecraft will fly within about 100 miles of the planet before being flung by the Martian gravity back towards Earth. According to a press release from the Inspiration Mars Foundation, “The flyby architecture lowers risk, with no critical propulsive maneuvers after leaving Earth vicinity, no entry into the Mars atmosphere, no rendezvous and docking, and represents the shortest duration round-trip mission to Mars. The 2018 launch opportunity also coincides with the 11-year solar minimum providing the lowest solar radiation exposure.”

The purpose behind sending a man and a woman who are also a couple is to make use of their comfort level which will be obviously tested severely inside a cramped space for over a year and half. There are no specific dimensions available yet but the living quarter would be the size of an average American bathroom with all manners of gear crowding the area. It will also have water tanks. Speaking of water, the couple’s drinking water needs will be met by recycling 75 percent of urine and flush water. To be in love is to drink each other’s recycled urine and flush water.

I am not sure how much the entire mission might cost but I have read the figure of a billion dollars. It should not be hard for Tito and his team to raise that amount given the sheer audacity and grandness of the vision. If I had that kind of money, I would write a check for the whole sum in the middle of the night.

The significance of this mission is not necessarily scientific but more inspirational and symbolic. The human race will have to evolve into a spacefaring civilization in the not too distant future. It is in this context that ‘Inspiration Mars’ is a worthwhile objective even if it means an interplanetary equivalent of taking a Southwest flight to Las Vegas. I am pretty sure it is not at all hard to find people who are willing to even to land on Mars fully aware that there is no coming back. I would volunteer for such a mission in a heart beat.

The backers of the mission are pretty clear that this is an American enterprise. They call it ‘A Mission for America’ and insist that the crew will be American as well as a man and woman to underscore equal gender representation. One is tempted to quibble with the parochialness of this being an American mission but then it is privately funded and one cannot really contest anything. That is a minor point in what clearly has the potential to put the human race on a spacefaring trajectory.

In the video that can be seen here, Hagel speaks about India in the context of Afghanistan and Pakistan and makes the following points:

“So there is some history where Afghanistan and Pakistan have similar interests. But mainly, they have not had similar interests. India is the other piece of this.”

“India for sometime has always used Afghanistan as a second front and India has over the years financed problems for Pakistan on that side of the border — and you can carry that into many dimensions.”

The comments have caused diplomatic kerfuffle with a spokesperson of the Indian embassy in Washington telling this to the Free Beacon in an email: "Such comments attributed to Sen. Hagel, who has been a long-standing friend of India and a prominent votary of close India-US relations, are contrary to the reality of India's unbounded dedication to the welfare of the Afghan people."

Hagel’s bit about India having “over the years financed problems for Pakistan” is clearly egregious but other than that it is an undeniable reality that Afghanistan is a sort of second front for India against Pakistan. Diplomatic rectitude may not permit a lot of people to acknowledge this simple fact of India’s regional statecraft. It is unquestionably in India’s strategic interests to maintain a strong presence in the Afghanistan beyond U.S. troops withdrawal in 2014. India’s strategic interests in Afghanistan are significantly defined by Pakistan.

What is objectionable is Hagel’s direct assertion that India has “financed problems for Pakistan”, which can only mean that New Delhi has materially sustained ferment in Pakistan from its northwestern border. This has the potential of playing into Islamabad’s narrative that post-U.S. withdrawal India is determined to maintain a strategically choking position from that border. For its part, Pakistan considers Afghanistan as a territory which would provide it useful strategic depth against India. A friendly dispensation in Afghanistan or, at the very least, the one that is compelled to be friendly by various means of statecraft, is very important for Islamabad. It would be churlish for India to deny that Pakistan has a greater interest in Afghanistan once the U.S. leaves.

New Delhi, in its wisdom, has rightly concluded that the way to the Afghan heart is via its reconstruction. India is financially invested in Afghanistan in a substantial way through its various reconstruction dollars. It is possible that India is motivated more by geostrategic exigencies than just pure neighborly altruism. To that, I say so what? Equally, it is a fact of history that India and Afghanistan have enjoyed robust and longstanding ties which are independent of the immediate strategic calculations. Whichever way one looks at it, India is a natural fit for Afghanistan.

Washington is acutely aware that China is a huge factor in the post-2014 Afghanistan, in no small measure also because of the latter’s vast mineral wealth. However, the United States would rather depend on India to play the role of the regional stabilizer.

If Hagel continues to maintain the views he expressed barely two years ago—and there is nothing so dramatic that has happened in the interregnum to alter them—then there is urgent need for President Barack Obama to moderate them.

India, on the other hand, must not be coy about its direct strategic interests in Afghanistan and must make it clear it would do everything to pursue them. Of course, financing ferment is not part of doing everything. That said, all major nation-states do as a matter of routine keep all options, including creating ferment, open. There is no more compelling example of that than America, whose defense secretary Hagel now is. It would be useful for him to engage New Delhi early in his tenure if he wants to see a successful draw-down of his troops from Afghanistan.

It is almost guaranteed that whenever he chooses to engage his Indian vis-à-vis he would be uncomfortably reminded of his 2011 comments. Unless, of course, he chooses to clarify them right away. Speaking of clarification, how does one get out a direct quote that India has financed problems for Pakistan? It would be so much more honorable for him to say that he does indeed believe that to be the case and face the consequences. The best India can/should do in the short-term is to enjoy his discomfiture.

February 26, 2013

People often ask me how I define ennui.* I reply somewhat expansively, “One of these days I hope to be able to draw it.” Well, I did it this morning. I define ennui in visual terms and to me it feels like my digital artwork above.

Ennui is a luxury that my penurious existence does not afford me. It sounds so much like something that only generationally wealthy French philosophers can afford to indulge in. Underlying ennui is a profound sense of futility about human existence. If ennui had a physical form I think it would be a very dense and viscous liquid.

Speaking of ennui or boredom, I am reminded of what my mother Snehlata used to tell me when I was in my 30s. As a child perhaps the most frequent expression out of my mouth used to be, “Ma, maney bahu kantalo** avey chhe.” (Mother, I am very bored). I suppose there is nothing particularly original about a child occasionally saying he or she is bored. In my case though the preponderance of kantalo made it seem like a deeper philosophical malaise.

I do not know why I woke up with ennui this morning because as I said someone with my precarious finances should feel anything but kantalo. For once I was not planning to write anything today. But then I autosuggested myself to try a visual representation of ennui or boredom or kantalo. That worked rather quickly. The illustration above took less than three minutes.

Do me favor please. Treat the artwork as an avant garde mind-art experiment, make a bid on this artwork for a respectable sum and buy it. There is no greater antidote to ennui or boredom or kantalo than hard cash.

* Anytime I begin a sentence saying ‘People often ask me’, promptly conclude that no one has ever actually asked me that. It is just a device I use to get started.

** The “lo” in kantalo has a peculiar sound in Gujarati which has no equivalent in English. It is not the ‘l’ sound but something more primal. It is the sound you hear when you gargle.

As is my wont, let me quickly deal with material extraneous to the main theme of this post about last night’s Oscars.

There is this little game I play with myself while watching ‘Family Guy’ as to which character may best approximate its hyper talented creator Seth MacFarlane. I have always suspected it is Stewie Griffin, the youngest child of Peter and Lois Griffin who is so undiguisedly sinister. Watching MacFarlane host last night’s Oscars I felt several times that he was struggling to keep Stewie from leaping out of his finely cut tuxedo. Of course, there were a few times when the devilish little child did manage to break free.

For instance, MacFarlane’s stinging reference to Chris Brown and Rihana. While talking about Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ he said, "This is the story of a man fighting to get back his woman, who's been subjected to unthinkable violence. Or as Chris Brown and Rihanna call it, a date movie." If squirming has any audio, it was heard after this joke. And then Stewie scrambled right back.

Stewie also came out early when, while referring to Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, he said this: “Daniel Day-Lewis, your process fascinates me. You were totally 100 percent in character as Lincoln during the movie… So when you saw a cell phone, would you have to go, “Oh my God, what’s that?” If you bumped into Don Cheadle on the studio lot, did you try to free him? How deep did your method go?”

There was another one about actors who had played Lincoln in the past and how they had managed to get inside their character’s head. "I always thought the actor who got most inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth," MacFarlane said much to the discomfiture of many in the audience. He mocked asking, “Too soon?” I thought this was MacFarlane at his finest even if it means he caused many to cringe and groan and squirm.

I am partial towards Seth MacFarlane. Whatever he says works for me because I can tell that there is about 95 percent that he has had to strangle and leave to die unsaid before he said whatever he eventually did. So that’s that about MacFarlane. He was brilliant.

I am writing about the Oscars mainly because for the next few hours at least that would be the most searched keyword in all search engines. That is always good to bring some eyeballs to this blog. Also, it can only help that those looking for Oscar Pistorius and ‘Blade Runner’ might also get algorithmically misdirected here.

Speaking of misdirection, about a trillion or so words will be written to analyze whether the Academy members got their Oscars right or not and whether there was more than just artistic consideration at play behind their decisions. The Academy members seemed to be trying to strike a balance in their choice of the big prizes of the evening—Best Picture, Best Editing and Best Directing. I mention these three in particular because I think I have a compelling point to make. Compelling is my own value judgment. You do not have to agree just as you do not have to read this blog.

Ang Lee got the best director, ‘Argo’ got ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Film Editing’ for Ben Affleck and William Goldenberg respectively. On the face of it this seems like a clever division of the honors. But I find this division irreconcilable.

When a director is recognized in the best directing category at the level of the Oscars (for that matter any comparable awards) there is that implicit acknowledgement that he or she helmed a film which is the best among the nominees. The recognition comes in the particular context of a movie. One cannot possibly divorce the idea of best directing from the movie that has been directed. I am finding hard to accept that Ang Lee, or for that matter any director who is so honored, gets the award without ‘Life of Pi’, or any movie, not simultaneously getting ‘Best Picture’. It is not as if Ang Lee is being given a lifetime achievement Oscar which is in recognition of his lifetime’s work and not for a particular movie. What are you the best director of if not the best picture?

To extend that logic, how is Argo ‘Best Picture’ without Affleck being recognized for its direction? ‘Argo’ could not possibly have become ‘Best Picture’ without Affleck making it so. Of course, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can always argue that ‘Best Picture’ is not just about the art of directing but also about production and overall execution. If that is the rationale, then I suppose I am beginning to look like a fool just about now.

I am equally intrigued by the best film editing category. Any film that wins in this category should, by logic, get ‘Best Picture’ as well. In Argo’s case it did but that is not always the case. My point is more about how the best film editor is chosen. Cinema being such an intensely collaborative medium, particularly between the director, cinematographer and editor, I am not entirely sure how the distinction between the three works. In particular the director and the editor are almost like conjoined twins during post production. My interest here is more academic than any real criticism of the latest awards. Imagine, for the sake of making this point, that there are 100,000 feet of raw footage that a film editor has to contend with to turn it into a 20,000-foot final cut. This requires tremendous technical, cinematic, narrative and visual skills.

That said, the fact remains that unless the editor has a lot of original material to choose from he or she would not have been able to create a tight final product. That in turn means that the director has consciously and, sometimes, unconsciously shot enough for the editor to play with. Against this backdrop, how is an outsider, in this case voting Academy members, to decide what the editor had had to slice through and clean up before giving the film a solid and cohesive visual narrative logic? Those who judge this category cannot possibly know what the director had given the editor to work with in the first place. However brilliant the editor may be, he/she does need footage to cut and trim.

That brings me to my (hopefully sensible) point about why a film that wins in the best film editing category is hard to decide because we don’t really know what the original material was. Of course, what is being judged is what we see in front of us and whether that has editing excellence. However, we also need to bear in mind what ought to have gone on behind-the-scenes in the editing room and during actual filming. It is entirely possible that the director devised the screenplay such that it already had very tight editing built into it.

Just about now I am beginning to wonder if there is any point to what I am saying. And I do not even have the mitigating circumstances of having drunk and partied all night to explain this rather fractured post. The only consolation is that it is about a bunch of self-absorbed people doing what they do best—applaud themselves. In their defense, the world does want to watch them. After all, not many of us would watch for four straight hours the annual ceremony recognizing excellence in hosiery manufacture, unless it concerns Victoria’s Secret.

February 24, 2013

Dr. Ashwin Vasavada is a planetary scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. He is the Deputy Project Scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory mission with its Curiosity rover. He helps lead an international team of over 400 scientists. (Photo: JPL, NASA)

By Mayank Chhaya

For NASA planetary scientist Ashwin Vasavada work on average is about 225 million kilometers away. Sometimes it moves as far as over 400 million kilometers. It is a good thing Dr. Vasavada does not have to travel to Mars where NASA’s most ambitious mission to date, the $2.5 billion Curiosity mission is digging rock and soil samples.

With a B.S. in Geophysics and Space Physics from University of California, Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in Planetary Science, California Institute of Technology, Dr. Vasavada is now in the midst of what could potentially upend our definitions of life.

As someone engaged in the geologic studies of Mars with regard to surface properties, volatiles, and climate history, he is at the cutting edge of finding out whether Mars ever had or has habitable environments capable of supporting microbial life.

As the Deputy Project Scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission with its Curiosity rover at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, he helps lead an international team of over 400 scientists.

A son of Gujarati parents, who came to America in the 1950s, Dr. Vasavada very nearly chose a career in music over science, but in the end, his parents persuaded him otherwise. Dr. Vasavada answered questions from me. The interview was originally conducted for three different media outlets, Gaon Connection, India’s rural newspaper in Hindi, Hi India, an Indian American weekly in Chicago and the IANS wire.

MC: Did Mars specifically figure in your childhood imagination or fantasy? If so, tell me a little about it?

AV: I've been fascinated by the planets since I was a child. I would often stare at pictures of Mars and Jupiter taken by early robotic spacecraft, and be amazed that these probes took pictures of landscapes that no human had ever seen. Pictures from spacecraft that landed on Mars' surface were especially captivating to me, since they were taken from eye level, just as if I was there, standing on another world.

MC: Did you grow up with a career path clearly laid out in your mind?

AV: I grew up with two alternate goals: to be involved in space exploration, and to be a musician. I wandered back and forth between them, and tried to pursue both in college. But I think my parents eventually won, and convinced me to pursue science.

MC: What drew you to geophysics and planetary science, not the two most preferred career choices for the Indian American community?

AV: Growing up in the USA I the 1980s, space exploration was an inspiration. There's a whole generation of scientists and engineers who were inspired by the Space Shuttle, and the exploration of the Moon and planets. At the same time, perhaps growing up in a smaller town with few other Indian Americans allowed me to consider other career options than just medicine! Honestly, I follow my own Indian father's tradition. He didn't become a doctor like his own father.

MC: Was there anything in your upbringing that may have prepared you for what you have eventually become?

AV: It goes without saying that the strong emphasis on education played a big part. My parents are both immigrants, and these values of education and working hard through college are shared by many immigrants and their children.

MC: Is it logical to assume that given the choice of your studies NASA would have been your early choice as the center of your career?

AV: Given my specific desire to explore the planets, NASA was the only choice.

MC: When did Mars begin to emerge as an important part of your career?

AV: Planetary scientists can work in laboratories or in theory, but the real fun is when you become part of an ongoing mission to another planet or moon. My first chance came in graduate school, when I was accepted at Caltech to join a professor and work on the next mission to Mars. The day I drove down to Pasadena to start, the spacecraft was lost when it failed to enter Mars' orbit. Even though I was set on studying Mars, I couldn't stand the thought of not working on an active mission. So I wrote a thesis on the Galileo mission to Jupiter, then went back to Mars after graduate school.

MC: I believe it has been eight years since you have been involved in the Curiosity mission. Was it difficult to sustain enthusiasm during this long gestation period?

AV: I began working on Curiosity in March 2004. Amazingly, there has never been a dull moment. There certainly is a lot of waiting for the payoff. But every step is challenging and interesting, from selecting the payload, designing the spacecraft, testing and rehearsing operations, launching, landing, and of course exploring Mars.

MC: The whole Curiosity mission is such a coming together of mind-bogglingly complex technologies. What are the challenges of being a team member on such a mission?

AV: One challenge is simply to have faith in the endeavor. Our success rate at Mars is about 50%, yet one dedicates a good decade of one's life to each effort. With Curiosity, we knew we were taking several different risks: a much larger and heavier rover, a new landing system, and an incredibly complex payload. Any one of these could spell doom in an instant, not to mention just simple bad luck. We all come to work each day doing our best to ensure the success of the mission, and with a certain amount of humility, asking colleagues to double check our work.

MC: Your work began after all the thrill of Curiosity’s long journey and extraordinary landing had probably worn off. Is it difficult to stay focused on what is arguably the key, albeit, tedious part of the mission?

AV: I think it gets tedious for some of the engineers who find their challenge and satisfaction in the design, testing, and landing. But for the scientists, every day now brings new discoveries. Our payload is working so fantastically well; it's such a great reward for all of the work in the last several years.

MC: Describe to me your typical day on the mission?

AV: We receive data from the spacecraft each day around 8 am. We quickly review the data to understand the health of the rover and instruments, and look for any quick scientific results that might determine what we do next. By 10 am, we have a set of preliminary plans for the next day on Mars. A few dozen scientists on duty will then meet with an equal number of engineers, and assemble the final plans, balancing the science requests with the capabilities and resources (like power and data downlink) on the rover. From noon until the evening these plans are checked, double-checked, and turned into the encoded commands to be transmitted. The commands are sent, we go to sleep, and the rover wakes up on Mars to do those activities.

MC: What are the highs and lows of your typical day?

HI: The highs are certainly the moment every morning where we see new pictures and hear the shouts of our team members as they realize they've made new discoveries. We have little celebrations nearly every day. The lows are when something we planned failed to work on Mars, either because we made a mistake or the rover had a problem. Of course part of my job is managing a group of highly talented, ambitious, and sometimes stressed scientists, so there can be some 'people issues' to work through as well.

MC: You are an important part of a team that will determine whether Mars ever had or can have conditions suitable for life. Tell us about what it feels to look at the basic chemical structure of the Martian soil and rock samples?

AV: Since the early days of planetary exploration, there's been a saying that no matter what we plan on these robotic missions, we will always be surprised. It's amazing that after 50 years of exploring Mars, we still are surprised. This mission is by far the most carefully planned robotic mission in the history of NASA. We used incredible amounts of data from previous missions to choose our landing site and develop very specific ideas to test with our payload. Yet every time we process a sample, we wait nervously for the results, knowing that there's a good chance we will discover something we couldn't even imagine before.

MC: What are the possibilities that Curiosity might have carried microbial contamination with it which may unwittingly get planted on Mars?

AV: We know we took a small amount of contamination with us to Mars; it's almost impossible not to. We just hope that it's about what we expect, since our experiments are designed to cope with that amount. We have had some unpleasant surprises, realizing that our drill was contaminating samples more than we thought, and realizing that we brought some Florida air with us (during the launch) that contaminated some air samples. But our team has found ways to work around these problems.

MC: How conscious are you and your colleagues that in the event any form of life is found on Mars would have a profoundly altering impact on what has forever been an anthropocentric world?

AV: I think all of our team is aware of the very fundamental questions we are addressing on this mission. But many Mars scientists are also quite sober about the chances of finding evidence of life on Mars or other places in the solar system. Whether or not we find evidence of life, Curiosity is designed to learn a great deal about the capability of Mars to support life. That is a big step toward a scientific understanding of potential life in the universe.

MC: How aware do you think the Mars team that what you do has the potential to completely upend our terrestrial hubris about who we are?

AV: I suspect we're all too caught up in the long and stressful hours of operating this rover to dwell on this too much. But there are moments, such as seeing the rocket leave Earth, where you suddenly realize what you're doing. I watched that rocket get smaller and smaller, all of a sudden feeling smaller and smaller myself.

MC: Do you see yourself as a space traveler who may someday be on the surface of Mars scooping up samples?

AV: Not really. Partly this is just being realistic; I'm not sure when we'll ever get there with humans. For now, Curiosity is a great virtual presence.

MC: How aware were you of the rather influential position that Mars has been accorded in Indian astrology and the laughable role it plays in determining marriages?

AV: Honestly, not very. Growing up in America, and being a scientist, I don't think a lot about astrology.

MC: Which part of India does your family originally come from?

AV: My family is Gujarati.

MC: Does your heritage in anyway inform your profession?

AV: Probably most significantly in the Indian values that brought me to this career level. One wonderful result of this mission has been a rediscovery of my heritage. I've received many emails from Indians around the world who have seen my name on this mission. And I've had the chance to talk with several Indian journalists and with Indian college students. It makes me proud to feel that I can represent Indians and Indian Americans in this way.

February 23, 2013

I have long appropriated for myself the position of a literary philistine. It suits me and does justice to my natural inability to comprehend deep, elegant and complex literary ideas and constructs.

It is from this position that I often wonder how great literary critics, of the kind that grace the pages of The New York Times and the New Yorker, second-guess and third-guess the minds of the authors whose books they are reviewing.

It is not my intention to single out any one critic but Michiko Kakutani comes to mind for her just published review of Mohsin Hamid’s ‘How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia’. In particular, her concluding paragraph that reads: “It is a measure of Mr. Hamid’s audacious talents that he manages to make his protagonist’s story work on so many levels. “You” is, at once, a modern-day Horatio Alger character, representing the desires and frustrations of millions in rising Asia; a bildungsroman hero, by turns knavish and recognizably human, who sallies forth from the provinces to find his destiny; and a nameless but intimately known soul, whose bittersweet romance with the pretty girl possesses a remarkable emotional power. With “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” Mr. Hamid reaffirms his place as one of his generation’s most inventive and gifted writers.”

This is indeed very high praise for any writer from any critic, let alone someone as exalted as Kakutani. My issue is with observations such as “a modern-day Horatio Alger character, representing the desires and frustrations of millions in rising Asia; a bildungsroman hero, by turns knavish and recognizably human…” It is doubtful whether while writing the book Hamid thought of making his protagonist, whom he refers to as only as You, “a modern-day Horatio Alger character” or “a bildungsroman hero, by turns knavish and recognizably human.” It is reasonable to say that Hamid did not wake up one morning and say to himself, ‘Now let me make You into a bildungsroman hero who is by turns knavish and recognizably human.”

I have been known to be frequently wrong about such matters but my sense is that Kakutani is probably reading much more into the book than what the author might have intended to say. Such reviews are written as if they are meant to showcase the critic’s own dazzlingly well-informed worldview rather than what the author may be saying.

Of course, reviews are necessarily about how a reader or a viewer has responded to a particular creative work and not about whether the creator of that work intended it to be received in a particular manner. That said, it is still my position that critics, especially those who enjoy a formidable reputation in their craft, do often read much more into a creative work than the creator may have thought of.

If there is any point to this post, it is that I have become immune to antacids after having consumed them for decades. There is no other way to explain that I am being so biliously bellicose on a Saturday morning.

February 22, 2013

Once you accept the incongruity of a cluster of tiny islands with a population of 330,000 barely managing to keep their heads above the Indian Ocean waters being called a country, the rest is easy. I refer, of course, to the Maldives, 500 miles southwest of India.

The Maldives’ main claim to fame is the ominous possibility that it may become one of the first countries to be submerged by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The Maldives is a collection of 1200 atolls, of which 80 percent barely manage to rise three to five feet above the sea level. That low elevation makes it the world's lowest nation.

The man who epitomized the Maldives’ main claim to fame is Mohammed Nasheed, until recently its president and now a politician on the run and in refuge at the Indian high commission in the capital Male. Nasheed was one of the most high profile voices against the dangers of climate change and global warming and how his tiny nation could soon go under. He once held a meeting of his entire cabinet underwater.

Political ferment in the Maldives has pushed Nasheed into a corner. Facing what he calls a politically motivated criminal investigation, Nasheed stayed away from a court hearing a week or so ago and instead took refuge in the Indian high commission. Being the preeminent power in the region India has often had to arbitrate local disputes. In terms of its demographic weight, dealing with the Maldives for India is like dealing with an island housing resort. It is a delicate act for a country of 1.2 billion people to treat a country of 330,000 with the requisite seriousness. But India tries.

For now the court hearing against Nasheed has been canceled but the threat of his arrest remains intact. The hearing was canceled mainly because they could not produce Nasheed in the court. India has dispatched diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla as its envoy to resolve the standoff that comes barely six months before the country’s presidential elections. The government of President Mohammed Waheed has the unpleasant task of criticizing India for harboring Nasheed even while balancing its strategic dependence on New Delhi.

Apprehensions have been expressed in recent months since the ouster of Nasheed that the Maldives might slip into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. The Waheed government has denied any such possibility.

With this as the background there has been some media chatter in India about whether the US should consider “intervention” in the Maldives. I don’t understand what that means. Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, who among other much broader South Asian interests is also concerned with the Maldives, was asked that question by Suhasini Haidar on CNN-IBN.

“I don't want to try to engage in speculation about what might happen. But our bottom lines again are, this all needs to take place in the context of the Maldivian constitution, and in the context of these very very important elections that are taking place.

All of us have a strong stake in the Maldives because they've been a very strong supporter of things like climate change and international human rights issues that are extremely important to the United States. So this is a country that we would like to see succeed and its institutions respected,” Blake said.

I would like to think that a country like the Maldives should be more concerned about the much greater elemental threat to its very geological existence than arresting a former president. No one should be surprised if a massive underwater earthquake in the region could set off tsunamis high enough to inundate the Maldives out of existence even before the rising sea levels could.

It was not that long ago Nasheed was actually looking at the possibilities of buying a new homeland to shift the Maldives as a country. "We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine," Nasheed was quoted as saying in 2008 just as he prepared to take over as president in 2008.

As for the direct U.S. intervention, I am not quite sure if the fragile ecosystem could withstand the sheer geostrategic weight of such an act. It might speed up its sinking. It is from that angle I do not comprehend the question.

Also, there is a larger philosophical question here about whether we need to change how we define a nation-state. Does the size of the population, for instance, need to be factored in while calling an entity a country? These are treacherous questions fraught with controversy. But someone has to raise them.

February 21, 2013

Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron does not believe in “returnism.” Returnism, incidentally, is his way of describing Britain returning iconic properties stolen during colonial times by the retiring colonial power.

At the top of the list of stolen colonial properties is the 105.6-carat Koh-i-noor diamond from India whose return the people of the country have demanded from time to time.

On the last day of his three-day visit, the question of the Koh-i-noor came up yet again. That the question was asked in Amritsar, Punjab has historic relevance. The Koh-i-noor was taken by the British East India Company in 1850 from Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of the Sikh empire. It became part of the British crown jewels when Queen Victoria became the empress of India in 1877.

"I don't think that's the right approach," Cameron has been quoted as saying by the Indian media while answering why the diamond should be returned to India. That’s not the right approach!? What does that mean? Suppose there was an individual who stole the Koh-in-noor and managed to remain free for 163 years. When confronted with the fact that the individual was in possession of a stolen property, he says, “"I don't think that's the right approach.” Would that absolve him?

Merely because a property was stolen by a state in the guise of wholly arbitrarily devised colonial powers is it right in taking such a flagrantly unreasonably position? "I certainly don't believe in 'returnism', as it were. I don't think that's sensible,” Cameron said. Of course, he does not believe in “returnism” and thinks it is not sensible.

I cannot imagine the 46-year-old prime minister walking up to the 86-year-old Queen Elizabeth II and saying, “Your Majesty, In the fitness of things and fairness of history, it is my government’s considered opinion reached after a strenuous internal debate that Great Britain ought to return the Koh-in-noor to India.”

It is hard for me to speculate how the queen might react to such a request. She might throw a royal fit (meaning tightly purse her lips) or she may just burst out laughing at the sheer improbability of the request.

The Koh-in-noor, which in Persian/Urdu means ‘Mountain of Light’, was once the largest diamond in the world. It lends an inordinately large value to the British crown jewels estimated to be worth billions of dollars. It is not an Indian property in the strictest sense of the word because over the centuries, some say even millennia, it has changed hands many times among Persian and Indian rulers.It is true that its last known individual possessor was Maharajah Duleep Singh.

It seems highly unlikely that the British royal family will return the diamond in the foreseeable or not so foreseeable future. They just love it too much. So as an alternative here is what I suggest India press for from Britain.

Treat the Koh-in-noor as India’s collateral with Britain. Against that collateral let India enjoy the following benefits in perpetuity or until such time as the diamond is returned.

For every year that the Koh-i-noor stays in the British crown, Britain allow 100,000 Indians to migrate to the country, no questions asked. None. I mean even if these potential immigrants had gone out to for an evening stroll past the British high commission in Chankaya Puri in New Delhi and decided on a whim to settle down in Britain.

To make it more practical, let these 100,000 annual immigrants be selected by a national lottery in India. They do not even have to come to the British high commission or any other mission to apply for their permanent residency. Those papers should be overnighted to them and every expense should be borne by the British government.

These 100,000 annual migrants should have secure job guarantees from the British government for at least ten years. When they land at Heathrow let Britain arrange for their transport, lodging and boarding. Of course, Britain will also pay for their air fares and maternity leave.

Require that the English cricket team lose every other match, Test, One day or T20, against India for the next 50 years. And they just can’t throw the matches. They have to come up with inventive ways of making each one thrilling before inevitably losing.

Require Prince Charles to visit India every year by flying commercial. In India he should do mandatory social work for a period of four weeks annually until such time as he becomes the king. Once he becomes the king, he should host 100,000 destitute Indians (separate from 100,000 annual immigrants) to week-long festivities to compensate for the excesses of Queen Victoria.

I will think of some other ways to compensate for their refusal to return the Koh-i-noor. For now, this seems like a reasonable first step in a long bargain.

February 20, 2013

Ten years ago my now defunct publishing company Literate World published the first comprehensive and richly detailed biography of Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

‘Inside an Elusive Mind’ by veteran journalist and seasoned Sri Lanka observer M R Narayan Swamy (MR) was a standout book in terms of its brilliant detailing and explaining the rise of the world’s most ruthless guerilla leader. The book was one of 10 that I personally commissioned as part an abortive effort to create solid global content. My vision was to emerge as a respectable and inventive publishing name on a global scale. The reality turned out to be diametrically opposite as partly manifest in this unpaid blog.

As I read the accounts of how Prabhakaran’s 12-year-old son Balachandran was allegedly killed in cold blood by the Sri Lankan army in May 2009, I was reminded of MR’s book this morning. The book is a compelling read if you want to understand what it is that has brought the debate to the cruel death of a 12-year-old boy.

Britain’s Channel 4 and independent filmmaker Callum Macrae have come together to make a documentary called ‘No Fire Zone’ about the Sri Lankan army’s massive operation in 2009 that not only wiped out Prabhakaran’s separatist Tamil Eelam movement led by his Tamil Tigers insurgents but killed him and thousands of others. In the immediate aftermath of that military onslaught it was not clear whether Prabhakaran’s family had survived or not.

The documentary’s main focus is on the allegations of grave war crimes committed during the operation. One major piece of evidence in support of the allegations is a set of three photographs of Balachandran apparently sitting inside a Sri Lankan military bunker. There is also a picture of him lying dead on the ground with five bullets in his chest. The allegation is that he was killed in cold blood after being captured alive.

The Sri Lankan government, which is under some serious international pressure over these allegations, has rejected the claim saying that the pictures are “morphed”. It has been Colombo’s consistent position that no war crimes were committed during the operation. The documentary has acquired particular traction in the run up to the upcoming annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. Like last year, this year too Sri Lanka will face a resolution that would likely question its commitment to human rights in general and to implementing he recommendations of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC).

The United States will introduce a fresh resolution at the UNHRC meeting starting February 25. For nearly three years after the military operation it was India’s support that considerably shielded Colombo against a serious human rights scrutiny. That changed last year when India voted against Sri Lanka on the US-sponsored resolution. There is a likelihood of New Delhi doing the same this time around as well.

With the Tamil Tigers eliminated, the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa has managed to accelerate the island nation’s economic growth fueled mainly by Chinese investments in infrastructure, including in developing the $1.4 billion Hambantota port. Being exposed to a global human rights censure is the last thing that the Rajapaksa government wants.

It is in this context that the Channel 4 documentary has come as a source of great discomfort for Colombo.

MR’s book did a terrific job of capturing Prabhakaran’s complex and macabre world that prevailed for over a quarter century inside the island nation. Among the many striking descriptions in the book there was one about Prabhakaran’s early life. “To anyone who cared to see, even at that early age Prabhakaran was already showing signs of being different from the rest of the crowd. Some of his actions and behavior betrayed an evolving ruthlessness that was to become the hallmark of his terror campaign later in his life,” Swamy writes. He particularly mentions how as a teenager Prabhakaran would tie himself inside a gunny bag and stay in the over 100 degrees F. sun the whole day as part of what in retrospect seemed like a routine designed to toughen himself.

“He would wrap himself with bags used for carrying red chilies or insert pins into his nails. If all this appeared to foreshadow a man preparing himself for a life that demanded great levels of physical endurance, Prabhakaran added a twist to it by pricking insects to death with needles,” Swamy writes.

Rereading this passage in light of the what Prabhakaran’s own son went through for no fault of his is quite a story.

February 19, 2013

British Prime Minister David Cameron’s assertion of a “special relationship” between his country and India during his ongoing visit reminds me of a series of macabre events unfolding barely a century and quarter ago.

In his seminal book ‘Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World’ American author and historian Mike Davis paints an unnerving picture of India under the British rule, particularly during the period 1876-1880.

An opium-addled viceroy named Robert Edward Lytton presided over the destiny of 250 million Indians battling starvation. The country, then a British colony, was in the firm grip of a famine that devoured millions of people (some ten million) mainly because Lytton rejected state intervention in regulating the price of grain. Critics also blame Lytton’s ruthless implementation of Britain’s trading policies, including of the export of the Indian produce, for the famine.

Florence Nightingale, the legendary British social reformer and statistician as well as the founder of modern nursing, said this of the Indian famine, “The more one hears about this famine, the more one feels that such a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before.”

Davis, a respected historian, quotes reports from the period that speak of pariah dogs “feasting on the bodies of dead children” in southern Indian areas of Nellore and Madras Deccan. While India was being ravaged by starvation, Lytton was also busy organizing a major celebration to mark the proclamation of Queen Victoria as the empress of India. During the weeklong festivities, which saw “officials, satraps and maharajas” enjoy “the most colossal and expensive meal in world history” it was estimated by a journalist that 100,000 people starved to death in Madras and Mysore.

Although considerable time has passed since the criminal subjugation of India by the British, it feels like poetic justice that Cameron should visit India for the second time in his tenure and really lay it on thick about bilateral potential. The “special relationship” that Cameron so sanguinely speaks about underscores how tables have turned between the world’s once preeminent colonial power and its most important colony. A writer in The Economist, that most English of English journals, found it fit to suggest that Britain looks like a “supplicant” to India now.

It is humorous how foreign dignitaries who come to India these days seek to outdo each other in emphasizing the specialness of their countries’ relationship with the subcontinent. Cameron, for instance, has proposed the same day visa service for Indian investors investing in Britain. He has also announced that there would be no cap on the number of Indian students who can seek visas or how long they can stay in Britain on completion of their education in the country.

Cameron’s three-day visit comes with what is regarded as the largest ever trade delegation from the United Kingdom to any country.

Some of my Indian diplomat friends tell me that when it comes to engagement with Britain Indian diplomacy no longer looks at bilateral ties through the prism of the two country’s longstanding relationship. The approach now is one of pragmatic economics where the focus is on what any engagement will gain for India in economic terms. The nostalgia infused diplomacy of the 19760s, 70s and even early 80s is well and truly over. Cameron might talk about the bilateral relationship that pivots around “history, language, culture” but from the Indian side the mood is now businesslike.

In a way, Cameron’s announcement of the same-day visa service for Indian investors is a recognition that bilateral relationship can no longer be dressed up in cuddly nostalgia. He has to accord it a tangible, practical dimension.

While on the subject, it would also be unproductive for Cameron to remind his Indian counterparts about the 1.5 million people of Indian origin who have made Britain their home. That number has no political or economic resonance in India. You may find more people turn up to eat chhole-kulche along Delhi’s Raj Path on summer evenings. (Literary exaggeration). Besides, while India does notionally care about its expatriates, it does not let them cloud its foreign policy calculations.

If Britain looks and feels like a supplicant to India, as the writer in The Economist suggests, a dispassionate analysis would indeed show that because the tables have indeed turned since the proclamation of Queen Victoria as the empress of India. Victoria now invokes visions of Candice Swanepoel among India’s urban young. Candice, incidentally, is one of the five top Victoria’s Secret models. At this point I am debating whether it is appropriate for me to carry an image of Candice here. Probably not.